Correlated oxide materials have been studied as candidates for electronic and optical application devices such as switches, sensors, and modulators due to substantial changes in their material properties such as conductivity and optical constants by phase transition. Compared to other correlated oxide materials that have a lower or a much higher phase transition temperature than room temperature, vanadium dioxide (VO2) exhibits a sharp insulator-to-metal transition (IMT) from the monoclinic insulating phase to the tetragonal metallic phase at 68° C. The relatively low phase transition temperature enables one to utilize the transition characteristic for electrical switching devices. However, the imperfect crystal quality of VO2 films has limited the development of high-performance VO2-based devices. Single crystalline bulk VO2 or epitaxial VO2 thin films have suffered from fracture and degradation of their physical properties due to a large elastic stress during phase transition. Moreover, the misfit strain in epitaxial films results in unreliable IMT characteristics or causes IMT to occur below room temperature. Due to such difficulties in VO2 growth, polycrystalline or amorphous VO2 thin films have been used for most application devices.